Judy, madly, deeply

Judge Judy is the toughest moral voice in reality TV, delivering her strict judgments on bullies and cheats twice a day on ITV2. Fan Fay Weldon asks her why she believes compulsory contraception and locking up young offenders will save American society.

There are pretty flowers and folderols everywhere, soft cushions and soft-footed waiters. Coffee and little sugary biscuits are served. I take the coffee black and don't eat the biscuits, though I am breakfast-less. Sugar is anathema to New Yorkers, I know, and Judy Sheindlin is very New York, tiny, elegant, charming and wise-crackingly clever. I must want her to think well of me.

"Have a cookie," she suggests.

"No thanks," I say. It's not so much that I want her approval, I realise. I fear her disapproval.

Judge Judy is a TV show watched daily by 10 million people worldwide, most of them women, and after 12 years of public popularity and critical non-attention is into its 11th series for CBS and still going strong. Sheindlin acts as a latter-day Queen Solomon, to whom the people bring their grievances against one another, and as such she doles out swift and scathing justice, threatening to cut the baby in half to decide who is the real mother. As befits the century, it's done from a TV screen, not a throne, in the form of a reality-show small claims court, and publicists, not prophets, extol her.

"Being a TV star is a great gift," she says. "Everyone treats you royally. I started out in a two-room apartment in Brooklyn, and thought, 'Never again.' Now all this." And she gestures round the grandeur of London's Dorchester hotel, this mother of five, grandmother to 11, wife of a retired high court judge. Then she complains that she hasn't slept. She had to move rooms to get away from a faulty air-conditioner and spent the night on a sofa with a towel beneath and a towel on top. "Even though I am a star," she adds, "it's the kind of thing that still happens."

I say I know what it's like. However hard I try, I still end up toiling up some hill in the rain with a carrier bag in each hand and a toddler clinging to my legs, and she looks at me with pity: too much. For her, it would never get quite as low as that.

For 25 years Sheindlin was a "real" family court judge in New York, notorious for her fast decisions and wise-cracking judgments, appreciated as the scourge of villains and the friend of the oppressed. And then TV discovered her and she became a reality-show judge instead, bringing her experience and attitudes with her, as she roots out liars, exposes cheats and berates vandals. She believed, and still believes, that young offenders need a sharp shock. "Five per cent were real bad apples," she says. "The other 95% were just trying to survive the only way they knew. But that does not excuse them." She has no time for a liberal press that finds excuses for antisocial behaviour and so encourages it. Oddly, the "real" people who turn up for her judgments seem to concur: they are content to abide by Judy's decisions, no matter how they are humbled and exposed, or smirk or rage after the show. It may be, of course, merely that the production company pays the fines she imposes, so contestants - those accused of cheating on eBay, bullied at school, sued by their mothers, persecuted by ex-spouses, or whatever, seem eager enough to turn up. It is Jerry Springer without the schadenfreude or noisy vulgarity, The Weakest Link without the spite.

The Judge Judy show dominates the ITV2 midweek daytime schedules, or you can watch a selection of her Solomonic judgments on YouTube, where 10-minute chunks of her programmes are freely available.

The path from Brooklyn to Hollywood - in 2006 she became the 2,304th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - was scarcely of her making. It just evolved. She had a secure and happy beginning - she describes her dentist father as "the greatest thing since sliced bread" and her mother as "a meat-and-potatoes kind of gal". Only when her father died did she realise to what degree her mother was "the glue that kept the family together. But then most women are."

A bright, argumentative girl, Sheindlin went to a tough state school, on to New York Law School and in 1965 began to practise law in Manhattan. In 1972 she moved on to the family court, where she prosecuted juvenile delinquency cases for the State of New York. Her approach was simple, caustic and forthright. "Take responsibility for yourself, your actions and the children you bring into the world. No excuses."

By the time she was outed by the TV programme 60 Minutes as a potential star, she had sat through more than 20,000 family cases. She had learned how to get through to people. "You have to make them listen, and you have to talk sense, and then they'll hear you." It made sense to use these rare skills to speak to the masses through a TV courtroom, and not to the few individuals in a real one.

She is described as acid-tongued and brutally sarcastic, but I see no evidence of it. She is more like a busy mother, beside herself with anxiety for the welfare of a troublesome child. When she tells a recalcitrant male litigant, "You're nothing special! Believe me, I have three sons so I know. You are no gift - you're not even good-looking," it is done to bring him to his senses, before he gets into worse trouble, rather than in an attempt to humiliate him. And still they come back for more.

She is reassuring and funny, both stern father and anxious mother to an audience I suspect she sees as dumb and getting dumber, and in dire need of reform. She is all for the swift, sharp shock of punishment, seeing it as the only approach to juvenile crime that works. I protest that the US already has the highest rate of youth imprisonment in the world, second only to China. She looks at me with sharp, intelligent eyes. "So?" she says. "Get them early and get them hard. Then they won't come back. The choice is theirs."

Fortunately these days the wealth of Solomon accompanies the love of the people. In a recent survey of Hollywood's best-paid "talkers", Sheindlin came joint third on $45m, with David Letterman, behind Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern. Indeed, she has just built herself a magnificent Versailles of a temple in Greenwich, Connecticut: 24,000 sq ft, 17 bathrooms, taking 400 labourers a mere 20 weeks to build, complete with fancy ready-made grounds transported thither in tubs. A Sims computer game construction for most of us, but for her, real. She impresses even herself. "The ceilings are higher even than they are here," she says.

She is a Brooklyn girl made good and does not forget it: high-powered, industrious, conscious of her responsibility. She believes celebrities must set an example: be like our Queen, not Britney's teenage sister - pregnant out of wedlock and setting a fashion for teenage pregnancies, which the tax-payer will have to support. She seems motivated less by ambition than by a genuine social conscience - she feels it would be immodest to claim 10 out of 10 for the latter. I award her a nine, inasmuch as in the UK, unlike in the US, we are suspicious of immoderate wealth.

I ask her about the election. She says it is touch and go. She is a friend of McCain - "a real meat-and-potatoes guy" - but likes Obama. He represents youth and hope and the capacity to trust, since no one knows anything about him. Everyone wants to vote for him - but in the quiet and secrecy of the voting booth, who knows what will happen? Caution may triumph over trust.

Different personalities seem to pop out of this tiny, graceful, powerful person speaking from the depths of her hotel armchair throne. Sometimes it is Mary Poppins, sometimes Supernanny, sometimes Barry Goldwater, the American politician known as Mr Conservative. She is "reactionary" in distrusting the liberal media, seeing it as having fostered the blame culture to the detriment of society, "progressive" in her approval of the feistiness of Michelle Obama.

Before we part, the photographer turns up and you remember this slip of a woman from Brooklyn is a star. There is a kind of focusing of energy here that the camera loves; so does she.

"Your top is uneven," tactfully murmurs her publicity guy. The black top has slipped over her shoulder to show a sliver of white.

"It is as I mean it to be," she replies sharply, and he quickly shuts up. She pulls the top down even further over her shoulder, and is instantly glamorous. She is right and he is wrong. It is this particular talent that has brought her to this point in life. She is everyone's tough but loving parent where parents are reluctant to be parents and want, disastrously in her view, to be buddies. Do what she says and you'll survive; defy her and you'll perish.

We have a picture taken together.

"I never know whether to keep my head up or down," I complain.

"Up," she says, "always up." I do as she says. Of course, she's right.

Reality TV - or semi-reality TV, as this is - is here to stay. We shouldn't complain: it is the people's choice. The producer's time has come. The contriver of the programme gets the glory; the writer and director are lucky if they get a mention. The cheaper daytime shows - property, cooking, lifestyle, courtroom - slop over into evening viewing. If we want information we go to the internet now, not a documentary. If we want drama there's the news and the goings-on of celebrities. If we want a stage not a screen we can go to a musical. The power of personality remains: Judge Judy has spawned a host of imitators, but none has her charisma, or her ratings.

A pity McCain didn't choose her, rather than Palin, for his running mate. Her idea of solving juvenile delinquency by having every woman implanted at birth with a contraceptive chip, to be taken out only on request, might cause some controversy. But one can see her point. At least every child born would be a wanted child, and not - as she sees it as being in the US - the result of an accident and a bottle of vodka.

She believes in the legal system. "All those good people huddling behind bars in gated communities - it's the wrong way round. The others should have the bars." And as I go she says, "It took them 13 years to get OJ Simpson but they got him. What goes around, comes around"

The 'idiot' teenager

A 17-year-old girl moves in with her boyfriend's family. She has a medical problem and is taken to hospital by the boy's mother, racking up significant bills. When the teenagers break up and the girl moves out, she and her mother refuse to pay. They are being sued for the hospital costs.

Judge Judy to defendant: Now, tell me about this episode that landed you in the hospital.

Defendant: I had a urinary tract infection.

JJ: You had a WHAT?

D: A urinary tract infection.

JJ: From too much sex?

D: No.

JJ: From WHAT?

D: I get them. It runs in my family.

[Some discussion of the case ensues, before Judge Judy concludes]

JJ: You are an IDIOT. And that's also probably congenital.

The eBay 'scammer'

Two women are suing an eBay trader, a mother of three, after they bought mobile phones from her online, but were sent only photographs of the goods. On calling the trader, they talked to her husband, who laughed at them and thanked them for the "shopping spree". Judge Judy is livid.

JJ to defendant: You're an idiot. And a scammer. You're a thief. Why don't you get a job? ... I'm older, smarter - if you live to be 120 you're not going to be as smart as

I am in one finger. Do you understand?

Defendant: I understand, but it's not true.

JJ: Oh yeah, it's true ... You have to find something constructive to do with your time, other than to make children who are going to grow up with no moral compass like their mother. Judgment for the plaintiff.

The 'disrespectful' ex

A man is accused of assaulting his ex-girlfriend. He is being sued for damages but claims that he simply "grabbed her shirt and pulled her close to me". The defendant's mother is with him in court, and Judge Judy asks her to stand up so her son can demonstrate what he did. A few attempts later ...

JJ: All I'm asking you to do is show me on your mother how you grabbed her and pulled her close to you.

Defendant: I was trying and then you said it wasn't how I did it.

JJ: You didn't pull her close to you. You put your hands on your mother's shirt and then you leaned into your mother and said something to her.

D: If you want me to grab my mother's shirt and pull her close, it's not going to happen.

JJ: Oh, why not?

D: Because it's disrespectful.

JJ: Right on! And if it's disrespectful to your mother, it's disrespectful to the mother of your children! Case closed.Kira Cochrane

• Fay Weldon's new novel, The Stepmother's Diary, is published by Quercus at £16.99. Judy Sheindlin will be on The Paul O'Grady Show today at 5pm on Channel 4; Judge Judy is on ITV2, Monday-Fridays at 11am and 6pm.